by Jean Rabe
Then he heard the click of a pistol’s hammer being cocked. He turned to look, expecting to see Brinkworth holding a gun.
But it wasn’t Brinkworth.
It was the girl. The dancer in the Port Said bar. Same dark hair, same fiery eyes, though lacking the kohl. Her outfit had changed, too. White blouse, tan jodhpurs and brown riding boots. And a big pistol—a Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver—with a bore which appeared—without the benefit of any clicked magnification—large enough to accommodate a locomotive.
Chance slowly raised his hands. “You’re making a mistake, Miss.”
“I don’t believe I am, Mr. Corrigan. And it’s not Miss. It’s Doctor. Doctor Ariella Moorcroft of the Egyptian Antiquities Service.”
“Shouldn’t you be in the Valley of the Kings catching tomb raiders?”
“And let you and your cohort complete your theft of the Hapy Treasure?”
“The what?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know. I was in that bar to attract Mr. Gavrilis’ attention—or that of his lackey.” Her gun never wavered she frowned. “Given the way you succumbed to drink in the bar, I’d not thought you would be useful here, but you have succeeded in moving their mad scheme ahead.”
Succumbed to drink? Chance had no idea what she was referring to because he remembered her, and Brinkworth and the fight, then a blue man. But a blue man made no sense. Was I seeing things? Chance concluded quickly he must have been. Had a blue man intervened, she wouldn’t have ascribed his collapse to drink. What in blazes were they serving me?
“I am afraid I don’t know what you are talking about, Doctor Moorcroft.” Chance shrugged, lowering his hands. “I’m here building a dam to stop flooding downriver.”
“You cannot be that stupid.”
“Apparently I am.”
“Then he hasn’t told you?” Her eyes tightened.“Hapy, the Egyptian god who is the Inundation, has been said since antiquity to dwell in a river cave near Aswan. Mr. Gavrilis has narrowed the search for that cave, which is said to hold a treasure trove of gold and other precious offerings from the Pharaohs to assure a flood. Emperor Seti I is said to have taken the spoils from his conquest of Kadesh—a French ton of gold and gems—and conveyed it to the cave himself. It is believed the location of the cave died with the last of the Ptolemys.”
Chance gasped. “And if they didn’t die, then he would know the location.”
“Who?”
Brinkworth’s pinched nasal voice answered her question. “Alexander Helios Gavrilis.” He emerged from the shadows with two large men bearing rifles. “He is the man who will become the new Ptolemy. Put your pistol down, please, Doctor Moorcroft. The both of you will come along without incident. His Highness left explicit orders as to how to handle a situation such as this.”
The instructions consisted of handcuffing the two of them and locking them into the tower’s dungeon. It really didn’t deserve that name, since it remained clean and dry, with a single electric light that burned constantly. Twelve-foot lengths of chain connected their handcuffs to an eye-bolt sunk into the concrete floor beneath that bulb. The chain allowed them access to the two iron cots with straw-stuffed mattresses on the walls and the single small, barred window facing the dam. Brinkworth, flanked by his ruffians, brought them meals of bread and water twice a day. He checked their heavy, bronze handcuffs morning and night, then departed with the air of a man who had outsmarted unruly children.
That first night of their incarceration, Ariella apologized. “I am sorry I got you into this.”
Chance, stretched out on one of the cots, clicked the eye up to study the lightbulb. “Brinkworth was looking for an excuse to discredit me. Had it not been this, it would have been something else. In fact, you’ve saved my life. He would have killed me, fed me to crocodiles, and told Gavrilis I’d embezzled money which he, himself, has stolen. You complicated things by bringing the Egyptian Antiquities Service into it. Assuming the Service knows you’re out here.”
She winced. “I am afraid not. Gavrilis is friendly with the Director. I was given orders not to interfere. The Director believes I am on a ship bound for England, on holiday. I guess it’s a crocodile’s belly for the both of us.”
Chance laughed. “You’ll end up in an Ottoman harem. I always liked Istanbul. The Hagia Sophia . . .”
“Mister Corrigan!”
“Yes?”
“Aren’t you going to do something?”
“Sure.”
She looked at him expectantly. “Well.”
Chance rolled over to face the wall. “I’m going to sleep.”
Occasional lightning flashes lit the nights, but rain falling never actually reached the ground. It evaporated well before—the ancient Egyptian gods teasing the mortals below. At least, that’s the way Ariella described it. Chance thought of it in terms of air currents and convection, making a few calculations based on windspeed, direction, and the proximity of the storms themselves.
On the fourth night, rains began steadily, accompanied by more lightning and thunder. The storm alone would have been enough to break the boredom of their captivity, but then the door to their prison opened. Gavrilis squeezed his way into the room. The two toughs flanked him. Brinkworth, with Ariella’s Webley-Fosbery tucked into his waistband, hovered in Gavrilis’ shadow.
The large man sighed when he saw Dr. Moorcroft. “We had hoped, my dear, you would have taken the director’s command to heart. You have no one to blame for your current condition but yourself. And you, our dear friend, we had genuine hopes that you would not become entangled in the peripheral aspects of your employment.”
Chance sat on the cot, measuring the distance to Gavrilis. The large man stood just far enough away that even if Chance hurled himself feet first at his host, the last Ptolemy would never be hit. Chance shrugged. “Do you mean the treasure? Or the other thing?”
Ariella blinked. “Other thing?”
Gavrilis’ smile froze. “I have no idea . . .”
Chance laughed. “I’m not the young kid you and the Brotherhood fooled at school. You told me that Harrison Hudson had taken Egyptian futures contracts out on the 1902 harvest. He was expecting a bumper crop since Egyptian cotton production has been increasing each year for the past fifteen.”
Gavrilis looked hard at him. “How could you know that?”
“I crew steamers, remember? Who do you think ships the stuff?” Chance clicked a close-up of Gavrilis’ astonishment. “This dam, you’ve engineered it to fill and fail. Should be around the second week in October, which means the 1902 cotton crop will be wiped out. And you, with your heavy interest in the American cotton crop, will benefit greatly. I believe, this idea is a dog that will hunt.”
Gavrilis raised his face, so his double-chin wobbled freely with his chuckle. He clasped his hands behind his back and smiled. “Very clever, Chance. I always thought the others underestimated you.”
Brinkworth gasped. “There is no treasure? No dynasty?”
“Fool. There is only money. And Chance is correct. This should please you, Chance, since Hudson will be ruined.”
“Not since you warned him of your plan.” Chance glanced skyward. “He was in the back room when we had dinner. He wasn’t alone. Probably four or five of them. They had fun listening to you confide in me and make a fool of me, much as Hudson did himself years ago. You had to humiliate me to prove you were their equal. They were with you on the airship going to Cairo.”
“You couldn’t have known . . .” Gavrilis’ eyes became slits. “You saw to the fueling of my airship. You measured the speed and realized we were carrying extra weight.”
“I realized a lot more.” Chance slowly shook his head. “You had no reason to bring me here, except to humiliate me, and I doubted even that would be enough of a motive. Then it occurred to me, you needed a scapegoat. You had Brinkworth all set up, but the opportunity to finish off the life that Hudson had crushed, that was what made my part critical. Putting me in char
ge of the project gets you clear. After all, all you tried to do was help out an old school chum down on his luck.”
“Had you been this clever in school, Chance, you’d be standing where I am now.” Gavrilis chuckled. “And for your information, Hudson sold his contracts in Cairo, at a slight loss, to agents of his enemies. They will be as broken as the dam.”
“You’ll come to realize that leaving me in charge of this project has caused you all sorts of problems.” Chance smiled as lightning flashed silver beyond the dungeon’s tiny window. “In the last three weeks I’ve laid enough stone to fix the flaw you engineered into the dam. It won’t fail and, in a week’s time, the spiders won’t be able to dive deep enough to make it fail.”
Thunder boomed. “In fact, given how the rain is coming down now, I’d say your plan dies at dawn!”
“What? No!” Gavrilis looked from the window to Chance, then snapped at Brinkworth. “Go, rouse the men. We have to fix things!”
Chance’s laughter filled the room. “If you think the spider pilots will destroy the dam . . .”
“I will do it myself and then, Chance Corrigan, I will return to finish you off!”
The quartet fled from the room, leaving the door open. Ariella made for it, but her chain pulled her up short. She tugged on it sharply. “You can’t let them go. Help me.”
“I have no intention of letting him succeed.” Chance dragged his iron cot over toward the center of the room, then stood and grabbed the light fixture. He got his fingernails beneath the edge and began working it back and forth to loosen the screws. The fixture came away in his hands, trailing a two foot length of wire. Chance then slammed the heel of his palm against the plaster and lath ceiling, cracking it along the line of a stud. He yanked the cord, pulling it down, all the way across the ceiling and down along the wall, producing thirty feet of wire.
He hopped off the cot and flipped it over so all the legs pointed upward. He began tightly coiling the wire around one of the legs.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting us out of these cuffs.” Chance smacked his cuffs against the top of the bed leg. They slid open as if they’d never been locked at all.
Ariella stared, her face open with disbelief. “How did you . . .”
He smiled. “I’ve just created an electro-magnet. Brass is not magnetic, but the little steel springs holding the locking mechanism closed are. A quick rap compresses the spring, the magnet holds it open. Come over here. Do what I did.”
She complied. “How did you know . . .”
“This ain’t the first time I’ve needed to shuck cuffs.”
“Then you could have gotten us out of here any time.”
Chance nodded. “No point until Gavrilis got here. He’s the one who’s got to be stopped.”
A couple of gunshots sounded outside. Chance ran to the window. Brinkworth and the toughs were trying to force workers onto the dam. Looked like Swensen was down. Gavrilis was squeezing himself through the cockpit hatch on one spider.
He turned from the window. “Can you work a wireless? Morse Code?”
“Yes.”
“Take the lift up to Gavrilis’ apartment. Alert Cairo and any place else that the flood is coming.”
“What are you going to do?”
He jerked his head toward the window. “I’m going to make sure that Gavrilis doesn’t make it worse.”
Rain slashed at Chance as he ran down the hill. Thunder boomed and lighting reduced the landscape to a nightmare chiaroscuro through which silhouettes ran. One of the spiders had started out onto the dam. The toughs used their rifles to herd Egyptians toward the construction. The other pilots were nowhere to be seen.
Brinkworth heard Chance’s approach. He turned, the pistol coming up, but not quickly enough. Chance leveled him with a roundhouse right to the jaw, and plucked the pistol from Brinkworth’s hand with his left. Spinning, Chance brought the pistol up. His eye clicked in tight and he fired.
The gunshots could barely compete with the thunder, but the bullets did their work well. The self-cocking revolver fired a .455 caliber bullet. It wasn’t quite the size of a freight-train, but hit as if it were. The toughs went down one after the other, and if they weren’t dead when they hit the ground, they soon were after the men swarmed them.
Chance ran to the remaining spider and slid nimbly into the cockpit. Closing switches, he engaged the electric motor. It hummed to life, and the mechanical spider lurched upright. Strapping himself into the control chair, Chance headed out onto the dam after Gavrilis.
The fat man had reached the center of the dam. He’d begun to nudge one of the large stone blocks out of the way. That feat of mechanical strength would have been impossible before Chance had increased the generator’s power.
If the dam goes, it is my fault.
Chance charged out onto the dam, his spider’s forelegs jutting forward, twin lances of steel. He flicked on the external loudspeaker. “You won’t succeed, Gavrilis!”
“But I shall!” Within his spider’s shell, Gavrilis pulled out one of his watches. He tugged on the stem, pulling out a wiry radio antenna. He flipped open the lid. A small light glowed, then fat fingers cranked watch hands around. “I shall not be stopped!”
Immediately Chance’s left eye clicked out of focus, then back in. Images swam, never matching that of his right eye. Pain jetted through his skull. Lightning flashes all but blinded him. His spider drifted to the left, toward the reservoir side of the dam.
Then Gavrilis’ spider pounced. One forearm smashed Chance’s spider-forelegs to the ground. The other fore-limb came around, crashing into Chance’s cockpit. Glass shattered, splinters stinging him. The spider tottered and then, in an incredibly lethargic ballet, it slipped to the side and plunged into the reservoir.
Chance reached out and one limb caught the dam’s lip. He looked up. Gavrilis’ spider reared up, forelimbs raised and pressed together, a dagger waiting to plunge straight through the cockpit.
“Goodbye, Chance!”
Then the unthinkable happened.
A lightning bolt hit the hydro-plant’s tower. It exploded in a brilliant shower of sparks. Chance’s motor, deprived of the energy to run it, failed, locking his spider up.
And likewise freezing Gavrilis’ metal arachnid atop the dam.
Which is when the Inundation came.
The rains that had hit Aswan had been nothing compared to those which had pounded the Ethiopian highlands days before. Water had sheeted off the hillsides, filling streams, swelling gullies, and finally pouring into the Nile. A wall of water surged down the river, raising the water level five feet in a matter of seconds.
The Inundation crashed into the dam and sheered off the top row of blocks. It scattered them and the metal spider as if they were a child’s toys. The last Chance saw of Gavrilis was the large man trying, in vain, to haul himself out of the cockpit. One of his watches had caught on the edge, sticking him fast.
The cresting wave carried Gavrilis away. Being tumbled down through the cataracts either destroyed the radio device controlling Chance’s eye, or moved it out of range. The explanation did not matter. The eye clicked back into focus.
Just in time so I can watch myself die.
The same water that swept Gavrilis away battered Chance’s spider against the dam. It broke the machine’s tenuous grip. The spider sank like a stone. Water gushed through the broken canopy, filling the cockpit with silty death while life-giving air bubbled up and away.
Chance held his breath until his lungs burned, his artificial eye letting him see everything with amazing clarity. And then, just before he involuntarily opened his mouth to suck in water, he again saw the blue man, and realized this was the end.
Chance awoke on the side of the river with Ariella’s lips pressed to his. “Breathe, damn you!”
He coughed, then rolled to his side. He vomited the Nile back into the channel. He coughed heavily and tried to get up, but she held on and he was too weak t
o fight her. He lay back.
“Where is he?”
“Who?”
“The blue man.” Chance scrubbed a hand over his face. “He was at the bar. He’s the reason I passed out. And then, down there, I saw him. He must have pulled me out of the cockpit and gotten me on the shore.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t see anyone. I sent the wireless message and then came down here. You were alone on the bank. If there were any footprints, they were washed away.”
“He was here. A blue man. In a loincloth. In the bar he had a lotus staff.”
Ariella looked toward the river. “It’s not possible.”
“What?”
She hugged her arms around herself. “Remember the treasure in Hapy’s cave?”
“Yes.”
“Hapy is the god of the Inundation. He’s represented as a blue man bearing a lotus.” She pointed to the river. “Could it be that he exists? That he knew of the danger the dam presented and selected you to fix things?”
Chance started to deny it, but the river’s roar sounded hauntingly like laughter for a moment. “He probably just didn’t like having to fit his flood into the last Ptolemy’s schedule.”
Chance stood and pulled Ariella to her feet. Then he reached up and unscrewed Gavrilis’ artificial eye. He stared at it for a moment, then dropped it and crushed it under foot.
She smiled. “You didn’t want anything of his anymore?”
Chance shook his head. “Nope. Not while I can make something better.”
Foggy Goggles
Donald J. Bingle
Random true facts about Donald J. Bingle: he was the Keeper of the World’s Largest Kazoo. He made up the science of Neo-Psycho-Physics for a time travel roleplaying game. He is a member of The International Thriller Writers. He once successfully limboed under a pole only nineteen inches off the ground. He is the author of the novel Greensword, a darkly comedic eco-thriller about global warming. He has written short stories about killer bunnies, Civil War soldiers, detectives, Renaissance Faire orcs, giant battling robots, demons, cats, time travelers, ghosts, time-traveling ghosts, a husband accused of murdering his wife, dogs, horses, gamers, soldiers, Neanderthals, commuters, little kids, kender, and serial killers. Of those subjects, he has occasional contact in real life only with dogs, cats, gamers, and commuters (unless some of those are, unknown to him, really time travelers, ghosts, demons, serial killers, or murder suspects). He prefers gamers to commuters. He prefers dogs to cats. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He was once hit by lightning. He was the world’s top-ranked tournament player of classic roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons for more than fifteen years. He is the author of the near future military sci-fi novel, Forced Conversion . He was an Eagle Scout. He is currently putting the finishing touches on a spy thriller. He is a corporate and securities attorney. He is a member of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. He has a fascinating website at www.donaldjbingle.com. He is a member of the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium. He used to write movie reviews for a comic book. He rarely gets steamed, but his work colleagues find him rather punky.